You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Remembering gazing forlornly at LS, the cheerleader of the mysterious olive skin, and dark brown eyes etc.
Jenny, a year older, at the other end of our street, too.
The ache … tongue-tied, like facing a childhood hero or famous actor or scientist …
A shadow of that looking at prime foliage.
It’s been a month of “last” tomato sandwiches, each day a surprise blessing.
There have even been at least two “final” rounds with a lawn mower, not that I’m complaining.
And now I’m out on the last cruise of the schooner season.
I’ve already mentioned telephone books.
And rotary telephones.
And now phonebooths and pay phones in general.
It’s largely gone over to donations, too, which typically prefer online credit card entries rather than paper checks. Try finding the address to send that check when you’re searching their website, perhaps on your smart phone.
For that matter, handling cash in general is overshadowed by those plastic cards.
Parking kiosks that demand credit cards do upset me, though.
I know I’m overlooking a lot more. Care to add to the list?
When she said she wasn’t good enough for me, it turned out she was right.
Oh, my, the things I uncovered later.
I really was so green.
Others can say the same of me.
An alternative way of knowing Christ. Not just about him – or it or they.
And definitely not just by the Book.
My definition: contra, English country, squares, and rounds, or folk rather than ballroom or rock – though a tango fascinates, I do the Swedish hambo, when a partner appears at one of our contradances.
~*~
This note came from before I discovered the line dances at Dover’s annual Greek Festival and then the “secret” of dancing them. The event took place every Labor Day weekend, though I did come to find other opportunities to dance in Greek circles.
All of them to date, though, have been in New England.
Who am I, really? What do I want to be remembered for?
Raccoon as a Trickster, a local Native twist.
Why be clever?
“The distance I felt came not from the country or the people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.”— narrator in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood set in Montana
A viral carousel.
Quaker by degrees. Turn up the heat?
Quaker vagabonds were Dharma bums, too. The itinerant ministry proffers its own humor.
Things I learned in two years of college French? Le is pronounced luh.
As a youth, I admired crystals grown from supersaturated solutions. Deep blue copper sulfate was my favorite.
I never expected a film literature course under Harry Geduld would influence my poetry as much as my college writing class under poet Dick Allen. But it did: the clash of thesis and antithesis producing an unanticipated synthesis in reaction, especially.
When I first began reading contemporary poetry (for pleasure, independent of classroom assignment), he sensed that often the poem existed as a single line or two, with the rest of the work as window dressing. Now I read the Psalms much the same way, for the poem within the poem, or at least the nugget your or I as the psalmist is to wrestle with on this occasion. Psalm 81, for instance, has both “voice in thunder” and “honey from rock.”
I’m past the bitterness, the years – all the lost potential.
Am recognizing I don’t walk the way I used to – those long meditative strolls through Bolton Hill, Owings Mills, the North End of Manchester, or around the hill or along the irrigation canal. Maybe some of it is a lack of leisure time or a heightened sense of focus on other projects or just having my own estate to explore. One or all or in-between.
But Kurt, the long-distance runner, has become the mountain hiker instead.
~*~
The above notes came from perhaps 20 years ago.
What I see now is that many of those walks were to work out nervous jitters.
These days I’m far more content to just sit.
And, I hate to add, I’m slower now, too.
Upon graduation from college, in my social-activist period, I wondered how American society could possibly afford High Art while so many went hungry and homeless – domestically as well as internationally. Then I began to see everywhere a desire for expressiveness – in every ghetto, the ghetto-blasters and Playboy, spreads, graffiti and blues bands. To say nothing of the influence of professional sport, to which nearly every ghetto youth seems to aspire. (And more than a few others.)
So opera and museums and other “Establishment” operations came to lose their exclusivity in my vision. Extravagant expenditures in those realms are overshadowed by big-league athletics sports for similar reasons and then by military budgets across much of the globe.
See how much each person needs to reach into the realms of thought and imagination – the spirit; anything less reduces our existence to nothing more than economics, impoverishing everyone in the society.
So I noted.
By the way, Versailles still offends me.
Jnana's Red Barn 